(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)
Kim LaPolla on her love of quilting: ?It?s part of everyone?s life. It?s something you can touch.?

(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)
Kim LaPolla on her love of quilting: ?It?s part of everyone?s life. It?s something you can touch.?

Photo: Krishna Hill

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(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)

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(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)

(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)

Photo: Krishna Hill

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Rabbit run: Many of LaPolla?s quilts are inspired by the nature around her home.

(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)
Rabbit run: Many of LaPolla?s quilts are inspired by the nature around her home.

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(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)

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(Krishna Hill/Life@Home)

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The Fabric of Life: The colorful quilts of Kim Lapolla

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Kim LaPolla had a mind for puzzles, so when she saw her first crazy quilt at 16, she was hooked. She grew up assembling tiny scale models for her father's architectural drawings, and the quilt, with all its careful piecing and beautiful embellishments, was a perfect fit.

Today, her art quilts are rich explorations of texture and design. While her pieces have much in common with traditional quilts, LaPolla's eschew simple blocks in favor of intricate splendor. She produces work full of painterly detail, but instead of a paintbrush, this artist employs a needle and thread.

To achieve these textile chiaroscuros, LaPolla often begins with a crazy quilt-like background. Then, she adds pictorial elements -- a line of boats and trees in "Kingston Festival," a giant rabbit in "Angry Rabbit" -- which are usually also carefully pieced together from various bits of fabric. The quilting that joins the pieces together provides another layer of detail. The stitches mimic the pattern of waves beneath the boats or the rabbit's fur and create a rich patina. To this, LaPolla adds beadwork, cord and other bits of embellishment, usually working these elements in by hand. The resulting works are three-dimensional, with surprises buried everywhere you look.

Making these art pieces is a time-consuming and arduous process, and LaPolla says she almost always gets the feeling, about midway through a piece, that it's not going to work this time. The walls hung with art quilts obviously contradict her.

Much of LaPolla's work has been inspired by the landscape around the Greenville Arms 1889 Inn, the country B&B she and her chef husband bought in 2004. LaPolla got the idea to buy an inn and hold quilt workshops from online quilt forums. Other quilters were always describing the "ultimate quilt retreat." So when she was bored at her job as a technical writer, she would go online and look for inns that were for sale. She found the Greenville Arms about the same time the tech job market started to bottom out. The inn had been home to the Hudson Valley Art Workshops since 1982, and the couple bought the inn, arrived New Year's Eve, and welcomed their first guests two short weeks later. Under LaPolla's direction, the workshops have grown and expanded, and she has added a number of fiber-arts classes to the roster, bringing in instructors and students from all over the country.

While these retreats aren't exactly quilting bees, LaPolla says they are a valuable space for fellowship. The 3- and 5-day retreats provide an opportunity for her to meet other fiber artists, learn new skills and enjoy the benefits of "being in a community of other people working together and sharing your same goals," she says.

Like many artists, LaPolla often works in series, taking one idea and elaborating upon it. "Sometimes, I just like playing with a color, or I see a particular image I like," LaPolla says. She has done a number of pieces about rabbits, which adorn the inn's front sitting room and dining room. She isn't sure where the fascination with rabbits originated, although customers have pointed out that she has a lot in common with the quiet animals, she says. She has also riffed on the seasons of the year, taking a number of images and transmuting them from month to month. Other pieces borrow from other media, such as "Bucephalus," a horse head made to look like mosaic tile, or "Fashion Crossroads," an abstract piece that weaves in items from the clothing industry.

While many fiber artists dye their own fabric to achieve just the right shade, LaPolla uses commercial fabrics because she enjoys the texture the prints bring to the piece. She likes how you "find little surprises when you take a closer look," like how in a landscape titled "Fields of Promise" the earth stretches to meet a blue sky crisscrossed with the names of flowers.

LaPolla buys fabric everywhere she goes, and her studio shelves are stacked with all the colors of the rainbow, and yet she's surprised by how often she doesn't have just what she's looking for. Her sun-drenched studio is a happy hubbub of light and pattern. Piles of fabric sit on her table by her sewing machine, and her waste can is nearly overflowing with scraps. These leavings, or "gifts" as they were dubbed by one of LaPolla's teachers, are inspiring on their own. The swirl of color makes you want to reach out and create something. That, LaPolla says, is what is so appealing about quilts. "It's fabric. It's part of everyone's life. It's something you can touch," she says.

Everyone needs a creative outlet, especially if she is in a job that doesn't produce something tangible, LaPolla says. As a technical writer, LaPolla yearned for something she could reach out and touch. Today, her own handiwork surrounds her, and the inn has become a destination for other artists who want the space and time to create something real.